The world of global work has never been short of disruptions. Geopolitical crises, shifting trade policies, travel restrictions, or technological upheaval, these are not occasional blips but recurring features of cross-border professional life. And yet, when we think about how global professionals manage these disruptions, we tend to focus almost entirely on the disruption itself: how severe it is, how long it lasts, and what resources organizations provide to help people cope. What we often overlook is what happens before the disruption hits.
A few years ago, together with my colleague Maïlys George, I had the rare opportunity to study this question in a way that is usually not possible in research. We had begun interviewing 30 global professionals about their work experiences in early 2020… and then COVID-19 struck. Suddenly, these professionals, whose work routinely involved international travel, were completely grounded. We reached out to the same individuals a few months later to understand how they were making sense of the disruption.
What made this study unusual and, I think, particularly valuable is its prospective design: we had data on how people felt before the disruption, not just after. This allowed us to ask a question that most research cannot: does what happened before the crisis shape how people respond to it?
The answer, it turns out, is a clear yes.
Three different responses to the same disruption
All 30 professionals in our study experienced some version of the same disruption: unprecedented travel bans that radically altered how they did their jobs. Yet they responded in strikingly different ways. Rather than a uniform reaction, we observed three distinct pathways, each rooted in the tensions these professionals had experienced before the pandemic.
The first group had felt disconnected from their colleagues prior to COVID-19, either because they experienced a strong sense of distinctiveness from distant coworkers, or because they struggled to bridge cultural gaps despite their attempts to do so. For these professionals, the pandemic’s unexpected quality of being globally shared became an opportunity. When everyone in Madrid, Munich, New York, or Tokyo was suddenly working from home, dealing with the same uncertainty and the same strange informality of video calls with pets and children in the background, the barriers that had previously made connection difficult simply dissolved. These professionals actively plugged in, developing stronger bonds with colleagues they had struggled to reach before.
The second group had experienced a different kind of pre-pandemic tension: ambivalence toward their work. They genuinely loved parts of their jobs while feeling frustrated or conflicted about others. But they were also extremely busy: 120 days of international travel a year does not leave much room for reflection. When travel restrictions suddenly cleared their schedules, they found themselves with something they had not had in years: time to think. These professionals seized this space to ponder—to reflect on what their work meant to them, to find renewed purpose in how their jobs served others, and in some cases to begin imagining a different professional future.
The third group is perhaps the most surprising. These professionals had held a clear aspiration for a more mobile self; a desired future in which they would expatriate, work across more countries, or fully inhabit an international identity. For them, the pandemic was experienced as a direct threat to this aspirational self. And their response? They paused. They stopped engaging in identity work, deliberately deferring thoughts and plans about their aspirations until the disruption passed. This runs against the common assumption that major shocks inevitably spark intense self-reflection and identity change. For these professionals, the perceived temporariness of the situation made pausing feel not like avoidance but like wisdom.
What this means for global work—and for managing change
There are several implications worth drawing out, especially for those navigating or managing disruptions in global organizations.
First, how global professionals respond to disruption is not random, it is shaped by the specific frictions and tensions they brought with them into the disruption. This means that knowing your people before a change hits is not just useful; it is strategically important. Organizations that invest in understanding employees’ pre-change experiences (what frustrates them, what they aspire to, where their relationships feel strained) are better positioned to anticipate how change will land and to tailor support accordingly.
Second, disruptions to global work can be surprisingly generative, but not for everyone and not automatically. The professionals who plugged in and pondered did so because the specific features of the pandemic happened to align with pre-existing unmet needs: a need to connect, a need to reflect. For others, the very same features were threatening. This suggests that the framing organizations use when communicating change matters enormously. Emphasizing shared experience and the opportunity for reflection may resonate powerfully with some employees while feeling hollow or even counterproductive to others.
Third, pausing is a legitimate response to disruption, and it deserves more attention than it typically receives. We tend to celebrate resilience stories of people who used a crisis to reinvent themselves. But for professionals whose aspirational identity is tied to mobility, whether this includes international assignments, cross-border careers or the freedom to work across geographies, disruptions that threaten that mobility may call for a different kind of response: the deliberate decision to hold, to wait, and to re-engage when conditions allow. This is not passivity; it is a form of strategic patience. Organizations would do well to recognize and support it, rather than pushing everyone toward premature reinvention.
A more proactive view of disruption
We are not done with disruptions in global work. Geopolitical fragmentation, the renegotiation of global supply chains, climate-driven constraints on travel, and the ongoing transformation wrought by AI are already reshaping what cross-border professional life looks like. Each of these will land differently depending on the history each professional brings to the moment of change.
The most important preparation for the next disruption, then, may not be the contingency plan sitting in a corporate drawer. It may be the self-awareness to know which tensions you carry with you, and the organizational culture that creates enough trust and space for people to share them.